Detective Hank Schrader Zings Gwyneth Paltrow on Twitter

Do you ever get the feeling that Gwyneth Paltrow is putting us all on?

We know from her movies and her Goop videos and her Twitter account that she can be fun and irreverent and down-to-earth, but when she gives interviews, it’s almost as if she’s playing a character. Call her Entitled Gwyneth.

Real Gwyneth totally appreciates that, even though being an A-list international celebrity is in fact a huge pain in the ass—what with the paparazzi and the stalkers and those strange people who materialize wherever you go carrying batches of glossy 8-by-10 head shots for you to sign—you’re not supposed to complain about it. That breaks the silent pact you have with your audience, wherein they pay to see your movies and buy your products, all while turning a blind eye to the fact that you make 100 times more money than they do just to run around in great outfits and kiss people for a living.

Maybe Real Gwyneth realizes how silly this all is, and so she deploys Entitled Gwyneth to subtly destabilize this unjust order. How else to explain a quote like this one, which she gave to E! News recently?:

“[Parenting is] much harder for me. I feel like I set it up in a way that makes it difficult because…for me, like if I miss a school run, they are like, ‘Where were you?’ I don’t like to be the lead so I don’t [have] to work every day, you know, I have little things that I like and obviously I want it to be good and challenging and interesting and be with good people and that kind of thing.” She added, “I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening. When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.”

Cue 10,000 mommy bloggers noting between clenched teeth that, while being a famous actress is surely stressful, it's hardly "much harder" than being a working mom. For starters, most 9-to-5 moms don’t own multiple houses or get to build nurseries in the workplace or have the resources to de-stress in the Bahamas. (This post is quite good, if you need an example.)

This was all foreseeable. You could almost say it was inevitable. Real Gwyneth must have known it was coming. The only interpretation is that she wanted it this way. It’s all part of her master plan to surreptitiously expose the absurdity of the modern celebrity system.

Or something.

What even Paltrow couldn’t have seen coming, however, was the arrival of Dean Norris, better known as Detective Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad. Norris operates a pretty freewheeling Twitter account, and he posted this little gem yesterday:

Note that the tweet never openly criticizes Gwyneth Paltrow. In fact, it ostensibly sides with her. But by playing on the stereotype we all have of actors as preening, self-congratulatory do-nothings, and of men as all of those things times 20, and then by turning those stereotypes on himself, Norris pulled off a pretty neat trick: he inserted himself into a conversation he had no business butting into, signaled to the world that he’s not just another out-of-touch actor (or, at the very least, is self-aware about it), and probably caught the eye of a casting director or two.